Prowl, an iPhone/iPod Touch ...

So, I hear you like the idea of push notifications on the iPhone. Oh, what's that? You wish you could send push notifications from your website and/or iPhone enabled web app? Hey, didn't you know that you can?

Thanks to Mike, and his post about what John Blyberg's been doing, I got interested in Prowl. Prowl is an iPhone app ($4.99 from the iTunes store, I believe) that lets us send push notifications to iPhone or iPod Touch devices (and hey, it works with 1st gen devices too!). You would need version 3.1 of the iPhone OS, and jailbroken phones are not officially supported (some work, some don't due to how they were jailbroken), but for the most part "it just works", and it's fast. From my tests, the longest delay I've had thus far on a "normal" importance level Prowl message was about 2-3 seconds.

So what use does it have? I'm sure there could be quite a lot. There are forums for Prowl discussions, and one of the stickied topics is just about what people are doing with custom notifications, and there are a varied slew of responses. It's quite interesting, actually.

It's not much of a surprise to anyone that's been keeping tabs on this blog (hi Mike) that I have been getting acquainted with the CakePHP framework. Because of all the uses of Prowl, and my newfound love for CakePHP, I've decided to write a plugin specifically for Prowl in CakePHP. I am not the first to create extensions for Prowl by any means, nor am I even the first to think of getting it CakePHP-ready. I've found two others after having started my work that have created Prowl Components: Jacob Oehler Morrison, and Eric Holmes (note: as of this writing, Eric Holmes' domain seems to be expired). Hopefully I can add a little bit more zest and out-of-the-box capabilities to a plugin. If anyone has some ideas, let me know about it in the comments!